Written by

Susan Green, Free Press Correspondent

Take one iconic and inspiring work that eventually would find its way into some four million homes: “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which covers a range of topics on women’s health, started out in 1970 as a 193-page newsprint publication that was stapled together.

It had been written by a group of 25 women, many of them moms, living in Cambridge and Boston, Mass. Their goal was to make information about about female anatomy, contraception, pregnancy, childbirth and other related subjects accessible to everyone.

What Americans may now think of as ordinary came across as a radical departure from the norm. No equivalent text was available anywhere.

“It was revolutionary,” suggested Madeleine Kunin, Vermont’s Democratic governor from 1985 to 1991. “Nobody had described women’s health and sexuality before. And they did it in such a clear, no-nonsense way. The authors were really pioneers.”

Among those who penned the landmark book in the Bay State, Jane Pincus has been a Vermonter for the better part of almost four decades. She runs a wholesale flower farm in rural Roxbury with her filmmaker husband, Ed Pincus, and remains a strong advocate for the thorny issues addressed by the tome — initially titled “Women and Their Bodies.”

Pincus contributed to and/or edited subsequent editions until 2005. Published by Simon & Schuster, the book has since swelled to 944 pages.

Yet, in a strange turn of events that she and her fellow scribes probably could never have predicted, a so-called War on Women is currently raging. This perceived assault seems to challenge the very essence of their work, which began as a series of informal discussions about health issues.

Presidential wannabes on the campaign trail have recently debated banning all forms of birth control. Some Republicans pledged to defund Planned Parenthood.

Republican-dominated state legislatures are introducing intrusive bills to limit reproductive rights. Women seeking to terminate their pregnancies were going to be subject at one point in Virginia to medically-unnecessary transvaginal probes. Employers might be allowed to ask why women want to buy contraceptives if their health- insurance plans are paying. Elsewhere, politicians are intent on redefining rape “victims” as “accusers,” or even making it legal to murder doctors who provide abortions.

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Many of these measures attempting to turn back the clock sound like the stuff of fiction. The nonfiction produced by Pincus and her colleagues frequently stunned a public that was far more sheltered than it is today. The lexicon was a-changin’, along with the times.

“There were women at the first course we gave at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late fall of 1970 who gasped because they had never heard the word ‘masturbation’ before,” recalled Pincus, who also remembers a nervous reaction in the room when someone wrote “vagina” on the blackboard.

These educational sessions grew out of simple need. The participants were searching for knowledge about the basics of their own human biology.

On a brisk April 2012 afternoon, Pincus and longtime friend Vilunya Diskin — visiting from the Boston area — chatted over lunch at a downtown Burlington cafe about their early days on the front lines of feminism.

While both pregnant, they first met at a 1965 Lamaze childbirth class in Cambridge. Each of them had encountered problems with previous pregnancies.

In the second half of the decade, many women were beginning to grow tired of “getting coffee for the guys” in local civil rights and anti-war activist circles, according to Pincus. “They wanted to talk about themselves for a change.”

She was going through a difficult time after the birth of her second child, feeling isolated and insecure. Pincus suspected other women probably could commiserate.

The idea of sharing realistic assessments of their most intimate concerns took shape. “Vilunya and I were in a ‘personal group,’ the sort of thing that was later known as a ‘consciousness-raising group,’” Pincus said. “We were nursing our babies then.”

The first workshop, called “Control of Our Bodies,” came out of that milieu in May of 1969 during a women’s liberation conference held at Boston’s Emmanuel College. An article handed out at that event had a militant edge to it: “Men and male society oppress women by viewing us only in terms of our bodies — as sexual objects and as a source of cheap domestic labor.”

About two dozen women interested in health began gathering at each other’s houses in September 1969. “We wanted to figure out what kind of healthcare were were getting,“ Pincus explained. “But we didn’t really yet know the questions to ask.”

They decided that each person would research a particular subject.

“One woman had had an abortion, which was still illegal then, and so she chose that,” Pincus said. ”Vilunya picked postpartum depression. I took pregnancy. We were all college-educated but had no expertise in these matters.”

Gynecology and obstetrics books of the day that they began reading in this pursuit seemed “appalling,” Pincus said. “Women were supposed to remain passive, dependent creatures, only producing babies. We had to begin a critique of the medical establishment.”

Their scholarly approach led to a survey conducted at various women’s gatherings. “We devised a questionnaire to help us make a list of good doctors,” Diskin said. “We got lots of responses, more than 200, but not one could recommend a doctor.”

Pincus has a slightly different recollection. She says the outreach was for help in understanding how to evaluate doctors, but did not result in denouncing any of them.

Two women enrolled in the 1970 course at MIT — then “a bastion of male supremacy,” Pincus noted — worked for the New England Free Press, a now-defunct radical collective in Boston that printed pamphlets and posters for movement organizations. They encouraged the organizers to turn what they were teaching into a book.

The men in charge of the political publishing endeavor were reluctant at first. Supportive of feminist causes in general, they somehow failed to see a connection to women’s heath, but finally agreed.

During the summer of 1970, women from the original health group wrote about their research and their own personal perspectives. Pincus touched on nutrition, physical changes and emotional needs. She even included photos of herself, unclothed and extremely pregnant, to illustrate the chapter. The book was necessarily graphic but also framed in the storytelling tradition, with wisdom that could be passed down through the ages.

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At the end of the year, the completed manuscript — then titled “Women and Their Bodies” — was out in print. Pincus remembers that each copy cost 75 cents because “the Free Press didn’t believe in making a profit.”

The project mushroomed. “We revised our work in 1971 and incorporated ourselves as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective,” Pincus said.

A second edition went for only 40 cents. “Without our knowledge, though, a quarter-million copies were sold,” she pointed out. “Colleges had been putting one in every student’s mailbox.”

Money was never the object, but the authors did envision an even wider audience. “It was clear we could reach more people by going with a commercial press: Simon & Schuster,” Pincus explained.

The New England Free Press, which was having trouble keeping up with demand, told the women, “You shouldn’t do business with capitalist pigs!”

Pincus and her comrades ignored this warning in the interest of improving women’s lives on a grander scale and, in the spring of 1973, a new version of “Our Bodies” with 278 pages was available for $2.95. In between raising children and similar domestic responsibilities, the book collective members fanned out across the country on promotional tours.

At a TV station in Cleveland, viewers responded enthusiastically by phoning in about the hippie chicks who had launched a nationwide awareness campaign. In one instance, a caller complained that Pincus should get her hair out of her eyes. “So, they gave me a bobby pin,” she reminisced with a laugh.

The women writers would also come under serious attack. The Moral Majority, led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, once described the book as “obscene trash” and it’s authors as “liberals and advocates of pornographic sex education.” That charge was leveled in 1981. By then, despite being banned by some conservative schools and libraries,“Our Bodies, Ourselves” was a proven success with an expanded 1979 edition.

Forty years ago, the health collective was all white and middle-class. Before long, the book and those who were updating it began to reflect society’s diversity in terms of multiculturalism, economic status and sexual identity. Readers also started to mail in their narratives, which were stirred into the mix.

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“The day before and sometimes the first day of my period, my whole abdominal cavity feels unsettled,” is one woman’s anonymous quote in a section about the menstrual cycle.

“My kid is dancing inside under my heart,” wrote another, whose poignant entry is in the pregnancy chapter.

“Our Bodies” has been translated into Spanish, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Armenian, Bulgarian and Korean, to name a few of the foreign-language editions. A handful of offshoot books, such as one devoted to menopause, also became part of the equation.

Generations of women have now benefitted from the groundbreaking effort. Erin Narey of Peacham, who is 37 and teaches English at Lyndon State College, might be a prime example.

The book is emblematic of women’s liberation, a concept that she considers a badge of honor. But upon hearing Narey describe herself as a feminist, other young citizens often ask: “Aren’t we done with that?”

Not so much. “If nothing else drives people to action, maybe fear will,” Narey said, referring to the contemporary struggle over reproductive rights.

Vermonters, proof of this conflict could be coming soon to a Planned Parenthood near you. A Protest the Pill Day is planned for June 2 by anti-abortion groups and birth control foes vowing coast-to-coast demonstrations, with people wearing lime green T-shirts that proclaim “The Pill Kills.”

For Narey, the need to defend privacy and freedom of choice has always been clear: “My family is matriarchal. My dad has a lot of sisters and we’re a vocal bunch. You really can’t keep a Narey girl quiet.”

As if to exemplify that notion, she coordinated a rally in Montpelier this weekend to coincide with similar initiatives in many states across America and a march on Washington, DC. These activities were under the umbrella of Unite Against the War on Women.

The event in Vermont’s capitol city featured a number of speakers, Madeleine Kunin among them. On Mother’s Day, May 13, Chelsea Green Publishing will release her latest book, “The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family.”

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She is flabbergasted that hard-won old battles are now reigniting.”Whoever thought contraception would be a hot topic again?” Kunin asked rhetorically. “I wouldn’t have dreamed this could happen. It’s a wake-up call. We’ve got to hold on to what we have. These (Republican) men are saying, ‘We are your moral authority.’”

Vilunya Diskin acknowledged that she “vacillates between being enraged and really worried about the future. They want to take over not just our bodies our our entire political system.”

Jane Pincus echoed that assessment. “I think the War on Women is also a War on Democracy,” she surmised. “We always have to fight for what is right and what is humane.”

They believe their literary legacy, “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” is still incredibly relevant for women from all walks of life.

But it once seemed shockingly controversial, even in a certain liberal former governor’s household: “We were so innocent and ignorant,” Kunin said. “You couldn’t leave that book out on your coffee table.”